Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 31 May 2020

A Room Full of Toys by Alberto Manguel

I think if I tried to compile a league table of the downright weirdest books I own, or that I’ve seen in almost any collection, this one would always have to feature somewhere near the top. It’s the Manchester United of weird books.

Published in 2006 by Thames and Hudson, although that great public intellectual, Alberto Manguel’s name is the lead on the book –he writes the text – it is in fact a collaborative effort. Also part of the team alongside Manguel is photographer, Michael Pintado and art director, Jean Haas. There’s also a foreword by Beatrice Salmon and an afterword from Dorothee Charles. So quite a team of people who thought this was a good idea.

And, maybe it is a brilliant idea - or very possibly just an hallucinogenic flight of fancy. At its heart is an attempt to reconstruct the childhood magic of toys – to eulogise the way toys allow children to construct stories, to develop imagination and to imbue their favourite toys with a life and a significance that lasts throughout life. In many ways it confirms what I’ve always thought - that adulthood is really just an extension of the way we played as children and so much of what we call ‘work’ is just an elaborate continuation of playtime. This book picks up that idea and takes it to yet another level.

What Pintado’s photography does is to capture tableaux of toys artfully and imaginatively arranged by Haas and then interpreted by Manguel’s often poetic and sometimes oblique commentary. This creative team have been given access to the toy collection of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and they have built little worlds that trace the history of these playthings from the 19th century right through to the 21st century.

The photographs specialise in the use of close-up to retain the integrity of the ‘room’ they inhabit and the use of heavily saturated colours and filters adds to the sense of three-dimensionality. The toys are placed and posed and seen – and this is important – from the perspective of the child at play and, were you inclined to do so, you could use each photographic plate to construct your own title scenarios.

I’m not quite sure who the audience is for this cornucopia of childhood memories –you probably need a fetishists delight in toys and a penchant for photography that specialises in detail and close-up. But probably most of all, you have to have an eye for the deliciously odd and be prepared to go along with the project – it’s art but probably not as you know it.

 

Terry Potter

May 2020

(Click on any image below to view them in a slide show format)

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